Government gives go ahead to summary care records

Despite Cameron's pledge to abolish the scheme

Cameron u-turns on SCR

The national summary care record (SCR) scheme is to go ahead, after a review of the project by the Department of Health concluded that the records would help patients receive safe treatment in emergencies or when being treated away from home.

The plan to develop a central database of electronic medical records for every patient in England was introduced by the last Labour government, with the aim of making sure that medical practitioners anywhere in the country could access an individual patient’s record.

In April this year, the Department of Health suspended the roll out of SCRs, while it took steps to make people more aware of what the records were.

In June, Simon Burns, the minister for NHS IT, announced that the records would only be created in areas where it was felt that people understood they had the ability to opt out of the scheme.

This week’s announcement means that the roll out will continue in the rest of the country.

Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of NO2ID, which opposes SCRs, said he remained concerned about the database, both for reasons of privacy and of medical safety.

“It is taking information out of the GP’s records and putting it into a centralised system where there is no medically trained person taking overall responsibility for the accuracy of that record.”

Booth said that many people were still unaware that they could opt out of the system, or that the record could be expanded to include other personal details.

“This is a shared repository of your medical history. It might in the first instance be presented as a summary care record, but it’s about adding information throughout your life. If the government is going to do something like that, it needs to go back to square one and inform everybody that that’s what it is.”

While still in opposition, David Cameron attacked the database as an example of the Labour government’s wastefulness and said that the Conservative Party would have adopted a different approach. “We would have said that today you don’t need a massive central computer to do this. People can store their health records securely online; they can show them to whichever doctor they want. They're in control, not the state.”

The scheme has come under attack from other quarters too. Last year, a study by University College London for the NHS concluded that electronic patient records did not help with clinical work and that similar large-scale programmes “promise much but sometimes deliver little".

So far, 30 million people have received letters about the scheme, and three million records have been created.